Movie Review - Blood Diamond

Last night I caught another movie which turned out to be much better than the last one I saw. Blood Diamond takes place during the civil war in Sierra Leone during the 1990s. The film is an action-adventure, romance story with politics in the background. It is exciting and stunningly well made but I must warn you with a fair amount of violence.

The civil war in Sierra Leone is fuelled by the trade in “blood diamonds”—in which gems are smuggled out of the country and sold to European buyers for arms money. Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), a fisherman, loses his son to the guerrilla army, the Revolutionary United Front, which press-gangs the boy into service. The R.U.F. also forces Solomon to work in the diamond fields, where he pulls a pink stone from the marshy waters. He buries it, but word gets around. It’s a very big diamond, and a smuggler named Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), a white Rhodesian by birth and a former mercenary in Angola, wants it. In the capital city of Freetown, Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), a magazine reporter, tries to cozy up to Archer so that she can get the story of how the smuggling racket works. Solomon, Danny, and Maddy all want something, and they take turns using, helping, and half trusting one another to get it, stumbling in and out of war zones as young killers rampage through the towns firing AK-47s from the backs of pickup trucks.

What stands this movie apart from most other adventure films is the acting of DiCaprio and Hounsou who will both be strongly considered for Oscar nominations. DiCaprio is likely the most talented actor in his age group right now and he is totally believable in this role. He is almost as good as he was in The Departed.